Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at the North West Learning Grid?

I’m Chief Executive of the North West Learning Grid , previously I worked for 8 years with Knowsley Local Authority. Knowsley is widely recognized as having a very progressive ICT strategy and is one of the first Authorities to implement a Building Schools for the Future Program.

How does the NWLG work with schools in your region?

NWLG is funded by each of the 18 Local Authorities and delivers services that are commonly required by all. This is difficult as North West Authorities are as big as Cheshire, as small as Blackpool, they include Manchester and Liverpool and each LA has very different needs and development states. We don’t work directly with schools, we provide services to Local Authorities who then work with their schools to exploit the benefits of regional aggregation.

Who do you partner with to deliver services to schools? How do you complement each other?

We provide 1GB of Internet transit to North West schools, through JANET and funded by BECTA . So JANET and BECTA are important partners. Our Interconnect between Local Authorities is provided by THUS. All of our other partnerships are within the Education Community. The way you work with any delivery partner requires both parties to be very open and transparent about what each needs and expects and for each to be highly committed to improving the education of our young people.

Why do you think Open Source Software is so important to the future of ICT in schools?

ICT in education is very fast moving and the UK Government has had a recent history of subsidising the commercial market by funding schools to do things such as buying digital resources and implementing learning platforms. Many of the products and solutions picked have very different proprietary standards. The Open Source Community is driven by, and can only flourish, by common open standards and this model suits the needs of schools and indeed the needs of any sensible ICT strategy, far more than the patchwork quilt of commercial solutions currently across UK education. Schools are not individual institutions, they form one cohesive body of educators and it is essential that they are able to use local variations of products that have the same standards at their core.

Why is Open Content so important in education?

Whilst I accept the position of commercial content developers and the innovation some of them have brought into learning resources in schools I am also aware that some £465M of public funding was used for schools to purchase resources out of eLearning Credits. Now that funding has finished schools are left with a list of subscription licences and no content assets to keep and use within their shiny new Learning Platforms. The nature of education and the way in which collaborative learning takes place, requires permanency and mobility of learning assets. We have exactly the opposite from the eLearning Credit Strategy and quite the opposite from how most of the commercial providers operate. They seem to understand the weaknesses of government grants far more than the customer base they hope to retain. Open Content is very important but we have self imposed barriers as well as having a schools community that understands very little about IPR and has very few tools that make content creation and sharing particularly easy.

What commercial and technical benefits do you think UK schools can gain from using more Open Source Software and Open Content?

I think that Open Source will enable schools to break a commercial monopoly that isn’t doing anybody any favours, and that includes the commercial companies themselves. Easy ways to share content creates easy ways to make it available to schools and therefore reduce sales costs. Common Open Source code in Learning Platforms reduces a company’s risks in development and enables them to innovate around that standard core. Reduced costs across the education system means more money can be invested in exploiting the technology, leading to continued demand.

What do you see as the remaining obstacles for their adoption?

Leadership. Why do we spend millions on MS Office in our schools when a bit of government expenditure helping schools to understand how Open Office can be installed and used would save all this money? Why didn’t we have an Open Source Core Learning Platform funded and developed four years ago rather than encourage 30 or more commercial products to compete against each other with 30 or more separate developments taking place, putting 30 or more barriers between schools in sharing any learning resources they create?

BECTA should have, and still could, form an Open Source Unit that concentrates purely on identifying and establishing Open Source Communities specifically for use within our education institutions. I’m aware of their sparring with Microsoft and the School’s Open Source Project but these are token gestures. We have much to learn from other countries who are both smarter and a lot more resilient when it comes to implementing Open Source within Education. How about Macedonia where they note that: “with the use of free and open source software, our education system can provide computer-based education for all school children within the limited financial and infrastructural confines that most institutions face today." Now there’s a good idea that ‘we’ didn’t think of. Let’s consider schools to be a single business community with a common set of goals and a huge ICT budget, and look for the most economical way to deliver their needs and get Value For Money.

Too much money available makes funding policy lazy and wasteful. Maybe now leaner times are here, Open Source will be seen as the ONLY way forward if we are to maintain ICT levels in schools?

Which Open Source projects excite you the most at the moment? What can you tell us about them?

North West Learning Grid has been trying to tackle the issue of how schools who have different Learning Platforms can share digital learning resources. If a Local Authority has £50,000 of education materials created by its City Learning Centres or its Specialist schools then that becomes £7.5M of resources across our 150 Local Authorities but each can only see and access just the resources they themselves have funded. What they lack is an easy way to collect these resources, apply a common set of standards across them and then deliver 150 times as much. We’ve found a great Open Source Repository product in Spain called AGREGA and over the next few months will be working with Sirius Corporation to implement a system where every Local Authority can easily share these resources. So for less than £100K we’ll release several million pounds worth of public assets and make every future digital resource investment worth 150 times more than it would have been!

How do you see the VLE market in UK schools maturing?

I see just a few major companies winning Building Schools for the Future (BSF) contracts and dominating the market and the innovators being squeezed out by the risk of having to innovate and a lack of major contracts. I would hope that Open Source competes against this through more developments around Moodle but it would take a brave BSF Local Education Partnership to go down the Open Source route when the project is heavily weighted towards having a single commercial supplier solution.

How do you see the role of regional grids for learning evolving over the next five years?

Regional Learning Grids will always have a role to play in aggregating expenditure from schools and Local Authorities but the agenda has moved on from broadband to sharing expertise and providing things that, by doing them regionally or cross regionally, they are done once rather than 20 or 30 times. Maybe, in the absence of effective national leadership on ICT development, the Regional Bodies will use Open Source Projects to deliver solutions that will redefine where that leadership comes from?